Turns out nostalgia couldn't save Time Bandits from an untimely demise, as the Apple TV+ series has been cancelled after one season

Welp, not everything from the '80s can make a comeback, as Apple's Time Bandits series has already been cancelled.

A couple of months ago, the first season of Time Bandits started airing on Apple TV+, but I doubt most of you knew that because clearly it didn't do well enough to be renewed for a second season. As reported by Deadline, the iPhone maker's streaming service has decided to not go ahead with a second season about a month after the last episode was released. If this comes as a surprise to you, I'm not really sure why, as on Metacritic the show sits at 66/100 on the critics side of things, with only 4.6/10 on the user score. That's not a great start for a first season of television, especially in an era where shows need to be massive hits to have any chance of getting renewed.

On top of that, Deadline notes that the show wasn't able to make its way into Nielsen's top 10 streaming rankings, suggesting there really wasn't much of an appetite for it from modern audiences - this comes with the caveat that Deadline has heard it's done well in the UK, the home country of the original 1981 film directed by Terry Gilliam, as well as the partial setting for the new version. Clearly that nostalgia from the Brits wasn't enough to keep it alive though.

Important to note is that the show did draw criticism from actors with dwarfism, due to the fact that the original film was mostly made up of actors with dwarfism, such as R2-D2 himself Kenny Baker, whereas the show completely sidestepped that in its casting. Aside from that issue, Charlyne Yi, one of the show's cast members, has alleged that they were assaulted on the set of the show.